Research Articles

Many chief marketing officers want their market research to possess more of these three qualities: Faster, cheaper, better. Making it happen, however, can be difficult—especially in the business-to-business category, which targets a more select group of individuals than business-to-consumer. Assembling focus groups takes time. Getting business leaders to fill out surveys can be expensive. Obtaining more detailed responses with follow-up questions can be downright impossible.

This trend is about the great big lie at the heart of the digital marketing industry. It feels like every day I hear about some nifty new measurement technique: multi-touch algorithmic attribution, eye-tracking studies, MRI brain scans. You could be forgiven for thinking that we’re living through a glorious revolution in marketing measurement. But we’re not.

Marketers have an obsession. A deep, dark, self-destructive obsession. What is the object of this obsession, you ask? In a word: newness. Marketers are absolutely obsessed with new things. New platforms. New products. And, above all else, new ideas. If I had a nickel for every time a client asked me for a never-been-done-before “big idea,” I could buy a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan.

Marketers have a toxic relationship with data. We love data, we fetishize data, we wax poetic about the glories of “data-driven marketing.” And don’t get me wrong, data is very important, especially in B2B. But not all data is created equal. We assume most data is good data. But it’s not. Most data is bad data. And sooner or later, our over-reliance on big bad data is going to cause a crisis.

What’s the worst idea in the marketing industry? Everybody has their own answer to that question. For some, it’s brand purpose. For others, it’s short-termism. For us, the answer is clear: personalization. You can’t go more than five seconds at a marketing conference without hearing about the promise of “one-to-one personalization at scale”. Personalization continues to be one of the biggest trends in the marketing industry. In 2019, it was named ‘word of the year’.

Lead generation marketers have dominated the B2B marketing landscape over the last decade, in large part, by focusing on generating short-term results – sales leads —and positioning marketing as a precise science where all waste can be eliminated and all actions can be tied to a dollar outcome. By positioning brand marketers as wasteful, lead generation marketers have wrestled away control of marketing budgets and wrestled away credit for sales growth. However, we’d argue that lead generation is much less the science it claims to be and, instead, is much more the art it claims to replace. In particular, we bristle at the idea that lead generation produces more sales for companies than brand marketing. The marketing science makes clear that lead generation captures demand but doesn’t really create demand.

According to world renowned experts Les Binet and Peter Field, marketers need to follow five key principles in order to maximize the effectiveness of their B2B advertising campaigns. Watch our exclusive readout of our new research in partnership with Les Binet, Peter Field, and the IPA. From investing in your share of voice to balancing brand and activation, our research analyzes the patterns in B2B marketing to determine which marketing strategies lead to the most growth.

What is quantum marketing? Well, it’s a theory. A grand, unified theory. A way of seeing the world (of marketing). And it’s a theory best explained through a story—a story about the history of the atom. For centuries, scientists believed that atoms worked like this: According to this model, the atom consists of a nucleus and a bunch of adorable little electrons, making neat, predictable circles around that nucleus. Scientists called this the planetary model of the atom because it mimicked the physics at work in outer space. Planets make neat, predictable circles around stars. That’s why the planetary model made so much sense.

What will define the future of B2B marketing? In this special edition of our B2B Trends series, Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo look beyond short-term uncertainty to explore the durable, contrarian ideas that will shape the next decade. The report highlights three major shifts that marketers can’t afford to ignore: The rising importance of brand building, creative strategies that cut through sameness, and distribution as the foundation of brand success. Grounded in timeless principles and a meta-analysis of past B2B Trends research, this report challenges conventional thinking and identifies strategies that will continue to drive growth through 2030 and beyond.

“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” So says Charlie Munger, one of the greatest investors in human history. Over the past 10 years, the rules of marketing effectiveness have become clearer and clearer, thanks to the valiant efforts of academic stalwarts like the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and independent researchers like Les Binet and Peter Field. But the remarkable thing isn’t how much we’ve learned about marketing – it’s how few marketers are actually following the evidence.

How does B2B marketing work? That’s a fun question, but here’s an even more fun question: How do B2B marketers think marketing works? What if we were to tell you that: (1) many B2B marketers have a wildly inaccurate understanding of how marketing works, and (2) as a result of that fundamental misunderstanding, many B2B marketers are setting themselves up to fail? Spoiler alert: that’s what we’re about to tell you!

Brand marketing creates more financial value than short-term performance marketing – the sooner B2B marketers flip their perspective and start allocating budgets accordingly, the better it will be for everyone in B2B.

Brands – both B2B and B2C – should focus less on keywords and more on making themselves memorable at the point of the buying decision. “The most important search engine is still the one in our minds.” That quote – from Jon Bradshaw, founder of the consultancy Brand Traction – is the most profoundly pithy idea we’ve heard in a long time.

The history of marketing is synonymous with consumer brands, but now B2B is the key driver of economic growth and it will be marketers who build those businesses. The marketing industry is obsessed with B2C brands. We love to talk about Coke and Pepsi, Rice Krispies and Frosties, Daz and Dove. Their every logo refresh and agency review gets covered in breathless detail. B2B is the opposite – nothing gets covered in any detail. “Put me on the B2B account,” said no creative director, ever.

For B2B firms, investing in brand marketing is the best bet in good times, and it’s an even better bet in bad times when the pool of current buyers shrinks from 5% to 1%. “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” That colourful quip comes from Warren Buffett, who built a $110bn fortune by deftly navigating economic downturns. So today, let’s ask ourselves the $110bn question: if Warren Buffett were a B2B marketer, how would he invest during a recession?

B-to-b creative tends to follow a set formula: product features + disembodied voice-over + generic visuals. You know what we’re talking about—stock images of professionals in gray suits sitting around a conference room table shaking hands. Text that describes your product in excruciating, quantitative detail. 111% ROI, 33% faster speeds, 77% reduction in costs. Generic attributes that could apply to any brand—“innovative,” “reliable.” And don’t forget the voice actor with the soothing baritone. And then, at the absolute last second, the big branding reveal.

Oracle is instantly recognizable by its bold red logo. Salesforce has Astro Nomical, its “warm and welcoming” mascot. Intel has that catchy chime. These are all examples of “brand assets,” and they’re increasingly important to B2B marketing success. At LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, we commissioned one of the biggest studies ever on B2B branding. We partnered with Distinctive BAT, a company that measures and tracks distinctive brand assets, and analyzed more than 300 brand assets from 59 brands across six of the biggest categories in B2B: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), business intelligence (BI), customer relationship management (CRM), cybersecurity, business banking and business insurance.

Most B2B marketers think the funnel is working - marketing fills the top, sales closes the bottom. But new research from LinkedIn tells a very different story: on average, only 16% of buyers are actually reached by both marketing and sales. That’s what we call the “circles of doom.”

Most of the buzz around AI is about creative disruption: faster ads, automated campaigns, generative content. But for B2B marketers, the bigger opportunity and the bigger disruption isn’t creative. It’s diagnosis: understanding the customer. Market research has always been slow, expensive, and painfully limited. AI changes that. Suddenly, B2B brands can tap into the world’s largest panel - the internet itself - and get insights faster, cheaper, and at scale.

Data shows B2B brands, like B2C, generally serve the same customers, which demonstrates the wisdom of marketing to every buyer in your category. Hyper-targeting might be the single most destructive idea in B2B marketing. This one bad idea has cost companies billions of dollars in lost revenue. According to hyper-targeting apologists, B2B brands grow best by targeting very specific customer segments with very specific creative. For example, hyper-targeters believe it’s wasteful to target all the IT professionals in Europe when instead, you could hyper-target IT directors in the pharmaceutical industry at companies with 10,000 employees in the UK.